The Recluse
by That Girl55
Summary: No one chooses to become an urban legend - no, by a series of unfortunate events they simply end up that way. oneshot.


_"She was the sort of person...who might know a great deal more than she chose to reveal."_

 _\- Agatha Christy_

()()()

They talk about her on the streets, when the young mothers go jogging past the house, when the kids ride by on their bikes. It's been called the Murder House for years now, but she's too old to care about disproving anything. After all these years, she's finally used to it.

She can hear them talk, but she'd never say anything. Like all stories, they get blown out of proportion after a while - truth and legend become intertwined and Violet Harmon becomes something of the latter.

The stories the children tell say that she was beautiful when she was young, that she had a bright future and a rich family. They say she fell in with a dangerous crowd, although no one will bring up names, who introduced her to witchcraft and alchemy, real pagan stuff, and told her the history of Murder House. The kids all say that she learned how to raise the dead, that she brought back the evil which destroyed that house in the first place. They say she reanimated Tate Langdon somehow, and fell in love with him, the very boy who ruthlessly killed so many children that fateful day at Westfield.

"He guards the house, you know." They say, riding down the street, their eyes slipping out from underneath WWE and BMX helmets to glance up at the house. "He keeps her trapped in there, and scares everyone else away. Not even the _mailman_ will deliver to the door. My dad told me that he hasn't seen her come out in at least five years - why, he said he'd send in a search party to check in on her by now, if she wasn't so young."

"How young?" The other kid would ask, wiping at his nose, runny from exertion and the chill that fall had brought.

"I _dunno_ ," The first boy would sigh dramatically, as if this was a massive bother to him. "Probably like, twenty, I guess. How would I know?"

And then they would ride off, to torment some other woman, probably, and leave Violet to her own devices.

Twenty-nine, she thought. She's spent twenty-nine years in this house, and the last five of them she's spent alone.

Well, not entirely alone. The gossipy mothers swear they hear music coming from the house at night, hypnotic, psychedelic rock from the 60s and 70s. They say you can hear her, laughing and dancing around the room in the arms of some strange blonde. These women will tell you that Violet and this mystery man have sex with the windows open at two or three in the morning, so loud and exhilarating that the whole neighborhood can hear Violet's moans.

Their stubborn husbands shake their heads, tell them that they're overthinking things, that they're being too suspicious. Violet knows they are not wrong.

The only company she's had in the past five years have been her housemates, Moira and Tate, Chad and Patrick. There's an occasional visit from her parents, but they are quick and short. They keep to themselves a lot, busy caring for their new baby.

Dr. Harmon argues that Tate is too close to Violet, that he influences her decisions too deeply. The unstable boy has rooted himself deep within their daughter, and sucked out her best parts until the Violet that her parents knew, the Violet before Murder House, is unrecognizable. When Vivian agrees with her husband, they stop visiting altogether. Dr. Harmon knows that Tate is to be feared as much in death as he was in life.

Hayden is present, too, along with many, many others.

In fact, it's all too often that Violet sneaks down to the back porch for a midnight cigarette and finds herself bumping into a new ghost altogether, one who's as confused about Violet's presence as she is about her own. Once, one of them asked Violet if she herself was the ghost, and Violet found she did not know how to answer.

She was alive, yes. Her heart was beating, air was coming out of her lungs, but she no longer existed with the living - did that make her more or less of a supernatural creature than the other beings in her home? Violet sighed - she was trapped in this house as much as they were, but not by any physical barriers.

Even if Violet left - moved to a new postal code, a new coast, even, she wouldn't be able to leave the house behind. Her parents had died here, her father's mistress buried under the gazebo in the backyard (after a while, all secrets come out), and her first love was here, a casualty of living in the home that was Murder House.

Every time she would try to leave, contemplate buying a plane ticket or renting a space across town, he would appear. He would touch her arm and stroke her hair and fuck her until she forgot her own name, much less plans to move. God's favorite angel kept her here, safe in a haven of sex and cigarette smoke and promises that he would never be able to fulfill.

And so she stayed on, taking care of the house as well as it took care of her. She waited for it to claim her soul, too, but death was taking its' sweet time on her.

As years went on, the whispers about Violet Harmon and her murder house became fewer; less people knew the story well enough to tell it, the children that had originally been enamored with the haunted house had grown up and had children of their own, and were more than willing to let the speculation surrounding the home die.

Violet herself watches from the upstairs window as the world grows and changes, as ivy surrounds the house and paint chips and windows begin to let the warm air in. She watches as the world outside of the home ages, watches as she herself ages, and sees how no one else around her does.

She realizes she's older than her own mother now, almost older than Moira. She waits for death to comes, she sobs when it does not. She wishes that, when her life finally ends, by some grace of god she does not die inside of the house.

She's spent her whole life here, she didn't want to spend her death here too.


End file.
